Che (Cyrillic)
Template:Short description Template:DistinguishTemplate:DistinguishTemplate:Hatnote Template:More citations needed Template:Infobox grapheme
Che (Ч ч; italics: Ч ч) is a letter of the Cyrillic script.
It commonly represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate Template:IPA, like the Template:Angbr in "switch" or Template:Angbr in "choice".
In English, it is romanized typically as Template:Angbr but sometimes as Template:Angbr, like in French. In German, it can be transcribed as Template:Angbr. In Slavic languages using the Latin Alphabet, it is transcribed as Template:Angbr so "Tchaikovsky" (Чайковский in Russian) may be transcribed as Chaykovskiy or Čajkovskij.
Form
The letter Che (Ч ч) resembles an upside-down lowercase Latin h, as well as resembling the digit 4, especially in digital or open-ended form. Cursive forms look like lowercase cursive forms of the letter R.
History
The name of Che in the Early Cyrillic alphabet was Чрьвь (črĭvĭ), meaning "worm".
In the Cyrillic numeral system, Che originally did not have a value, however, by the 1300s it started to be used with the numeric value 90 as a replacement for Koppa, some varieties that preserved Koppa around this time used Che with the value 60 instead of the usual letter for it, Ksi. Nowadays, Koppa is not used anymore in any variety, and Che has fully replaced it as the letter with the numeric value 90.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Usage
Slavic languages
Except for Russian and Serbian, all Cyrillic-alphabet Slavic languages use Che to represent the voiceless postalveolar affricate Template:IPA (the ch sound in English).
In Russian, Che usually represents the voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate Template:IPA (like the Mandarin pronunciation of j in pinyin). It is occasionally exceptionally pronounced as:
- the voiceless retroflex affricate Template:IPA (like Mandarin pinyin zh), like in Template:Langx, or
- the voiceless retroflex fricative Template:IPA (like Mandarin pinyin sh), like in Template:Langx.
In Serbian, Che is always pronounced as Template:IPA (Latin: č), as the letter Tshe (Ћ/ћ; Latin: ć), which is unique to Serbian, is always used for the Template:IPA sound. Loanwords using /tʃ/ are typically transliterated to Che rather than Tshe.
In China
The 1955 version of Hanyu pinyin contained the Che for the sound [tɕ] (for which later the letter j was used),<ref>"其中ч是取自俄文字母" https://www.douban.com/note/603048605/</ref> apparently because of its similarity to the Bopomofo letterㄐ.Template:Citation needed
The Latin Zhuang alphabet used a modified Hindu-Arabic numeral 4, strongly resembling Che, from 1957 to 1986 to represent the fourth (falling) tone. In 1986, it was replaced by the Latin letter X.
Related letters and other similar characters
- 4 : 4 - Number that very closely resembles Che, especially in digital or open ended form
- C c : Latin letter C - the same sound in Malay, Indonesian, Italian
- Č č : Latin letter C with caron
- Ç ç : Latin letter C with cedilla - an Albanian, Azerbaijani, Kurdish, Turkish, and Turkmen letter
- Ĉ ĉ : Latin letter C with circumflex, used in Esperanto language
- Tx : Digraph Tx, used in Basque and Catalan.
- Ch : Digraph Ch
- Cs : Digraph Cs
- Cz : Digraph Cz
- Ҷ ҷ : Cyrillic letter Che with descender
- Ӵ ӵ : Cyrillic letter Che with diaeresis
- Ҹ ҹ : Cyrillic letter Che with vertical stroke
- Ӌ ӌ : Cyrillic letter Khakassian Che
- Ɥ ɥ : Latin letter turned H
- Վ վ : Armenian letter Vev
- Կ կ : Armenian letter Ken
Computing codes
See also
References
Explanatory footnotes
Template:Note In some varieties of Western Cyrillic, Ҁ was used for 90, and Ч was used for 60 instead of Ѯ.